The Ghost of ACA Sabotage Plots Past*

Since the latest battle in the Republican Party's 15 year long campaign to gut the ACA will reach its catastrophic conclusion in just a few days...and since we may well be going from one government shutdown to the next over that issue... and since a leitmotif of this little blog of mine has been the absolutely lethal effect which the Both Sides Do It lie has had on our media and our politics... in the spirit of the season, let's tie that all together in a big, Christmas bow and take a No Fair Remembering Stuff (™) journey back to the Before Time about which most dare not speak.

The date: September 25, 2013.  

The location: The United States Senate.

The issue: Passing the damn budget.

Tea Party crank, first-term Texas senator and possible Zodiac-killer, Ted Cruz, decided that heaving a boulder onto the budget-approval tracks by staging a filibuster to kill the Affordable Care Act by stopping the vote to pass the budget would conjure him some political capital.  So he began running his mouth on September 25th and didn't stop until the next day.  His all-night stunt included him quoting the Founding Fathers and the Bible and reading “Green Eggs and Ham.”  

There are videos of this on YouTube which I will spare you because I'm a nice guy.

Cruz's irritating stunt didn't delay the Senate vote on the ACA.  It didn't change any votes in the Senate, but it did manage to piss off a number of Senate Republicans.  However it also inspired Republican Tea Party lunatics in the House to just up and shut the whole government down to try to kill the Affordable Care Act.  

The Republican House kept the government shut down for 16 long days and then gave up.  

In the end the shutdown accomplished nothing but the temporary furlough of 800,000 federal workers, punching the economy in the gut and infuriating the general public.  This doomed idiocy was led by Heritage Action and the Fake Tea Party.  Republicans lost, Democrats won, and the government reopened with an agreement to vote on a clean funding bill that didn't screw with the ACA, on October 25 

Here is a portion of a speech that then-president Barack Obama gave during the shutdown, included here because it'll come up later.

Given all of this high drama, it should come as no surprise that on Sunday, October 20, 2013, the Sunday Shows were full of Gummint Shutdown Talk.  And, since I have extensive Sunday Morning Comin' Down archives --

-- I rooted around in there for a bit and my oh my, is this all going to sound familiar.  

This is me, from The Before Time of 2013.

This week, another drunk dial from the Valley of the Dead as the Both Sides Caucus fired up their fighters and screamed into the sky to strafe any attempt at truth and reconciliation to bits.

First, on "This Week...with The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea" we begin with a panel of delusional teabaggers perfectly ordinary, indignant white Americans who express their love for Murrica and their completely rational concerns about how the Kenyan Usurper has personally stomped everything they ever loved to death by dutifully regurgitating every brain-dead, wingnut bumper-sticker you have ever heard of.

What was missing?

How about...an identical panel of non-crazy Liberals?

Anywhere?

Ever?

Patiently and lovingly deconstructing paranoid Conservative piffle?

For the one millionth time?

That you will never see on network teevee.

Instead, we pivot straight to Matthew Dowd (paid Conservative Shill who still has a job in front of a teevee camera for reasons that continue to defy understanding) and Adam Kinzinger (R, IL Whitelandia) tag-teaming the Kenyan Usurper for committing the single most horrific transgression against the serenity of the life forms who exist floating from party to party within the Washington D.C. terrarium: actually naming and blaming the people who were actually to blame for the most recent Republican clusterfuck:

DOWD I think that Martha, part of the real problem in this is until this part changes I think that we're going to be in this situation. We need to redefine winning differently. We define winning today as us versus them.

I'm going to score points and if I don't score points I'm going to decide who the winner and the loser is. We define everything as a battle, everything as a civil war. The president, I think, has tried to balance this tension, but I think he constantly falls into; I think he would like to bring the country together and be accommodating and do all that. He ran on that just like Bush ran on that.

The end result of Bush's didn't turn out well. The end results of President Obama's didn't turn out well. But I think President Obama lapses back into this sort of dualistic thing that, OK I wasn't able to do it, I'm going to point fingers and I'm going to, and you watched his speech last week. And his speech last week was a perfect microcosm--

Martha Raddatz, (warming the seat for The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea): Let's change the tone, but maybe not. 

DOWD: Let's change the tone but they're at fault. Whenever you say they're at fault, you can't--

To her credit, Representative Donna Edwards, (D, MD) actually attempted to haul this umpteenth iteration of the same, sick, tired, trifling, poisonous, premeditated, highly profitable and genuinely evil Both Sider bullshit to the ground:

EDWARDS: Well Matt come on it is really important here. We don't want to do a rewrite of this. And in order not to do a rewrite, you actually have to understand who was, who was at fault. And there was real fault here. We had a majority of Republicans--

And for her trouble, she was promptly and frantically side-tackled (in a brutal, face-mask-grabbing, fact-snapping move called "Blitzering" in the lingua franca of Bullshit Mountain) by Ms. Raddatz:

RADDATZ: But that again is--

EDWARDS: And Democrats who wanted to keep the government opened.

RADDATZ: Peter let me switch a little bit here. I want you all to talk about Obamacare...

Translation: Please stop pointing out that more than half the guests on this show are paranoids, nihilists, rubes and liars!

Meanwhile, over at "Meet the Press" we find exactly the same song being sung in a different key.

First, to establish that one is not flat-out insane, one must make a token gesture in the direction of acknowledging that the Tea Party (for which you expressed such fondness back in 2010) might actually be a little tetched:

DAVID BROOKS:  I think the Republicans may decide to tire of doing face plants. And so I think the moderate Republicans, such as they exist, may have had a little manhood injection, willing to stand up to the Tea Party and actually be a much more bipartisan, or at least a more moderate, party, a more realistic party...

DAVID BROOKS: ...The question now is will the Republican Party have a civil war over the nature of the party? And I think we're beginning to see rumblings of that. The problem is, to have a civil war, you actually have to have two sides. The Tea Party has a side. They have a political movement. They have a think tank. They have a donor side. 

The other side, the Republicans who want to be able to compete in California, in New York, along the east coast and in Illinois, they don't have a side. They have American Crossroads, a PAC. They have a cocktail party. And so what they need to do is actually build some institutions, some think tanks, some fundraising efforts, some grassroots organizations, to match Tea Party, or else the Tea Party will take over.

driftglass aside/

Golly, I wonder whatever happened to those institutions and think tanks and passion and money?

Oh yeah!  I remember!   

In order to win elections, you handed all of that over to these people  

 

when you made Rush Limbaugh your "Majority Maker" 20 years ago.

/ end driftglass aside

Then, once they were done with all the icky work of grudgingly granting that Liberals have been right all along (without, of course, actually acknowledging the existence of Liberals or their rightness) 'bout a mile outta Both Sider Town...

...Andrea Mitchell says, "Pig Pen, this here's Rubber Duck...

...And I'm about to put the hammer down."

ANDREA MITCHELL:  Both sides are going to have to give.

'Cause we got a little ol' convoy

Rockin' through the night.

Yeah, we got a little ol' convoy,

Ain't she a beautiful sight?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. The question [President Barack Obama had] never answered in all these years is, "How do I build a governing majority in this circumstance?"

Come on and join our convoy

Ain't nothin' gonna get in our way.

DAVID GREGORY [rough translation]:  Fuck yeah!

We gonna roll this truckin' convoy

'Cross the U-S-A.

DAVID BROOKS:   He's got 40 House Republicans who are never going to be with him. How does he siphon them off and get the other Republicans on his side to get a majority coalition? You have to anger the left a little to build that bipartisan coalition. He's never figured out a way to do that.

Convoy!

E. J. Dionne was on-hand to provide some tired, token push-back -- 

--compared to the Democrats, oddly particularly in Tea Party. The president, a lot of times, though, when people say the president should lead, what they want him to do is adopt Republican positions and then push for those. That's not leadership, that's capitulation. I think we should stop talking about a grand bargain and try to have normal government in the next two months. Let's just get rid of some of this sequester, which is hurting the economy, and which a lot of Republicans don't like.

-- to which absolutely no one paid any heed.  Of course, if E.J. Dionne did want anyone to pay any attention to what he was saying, all he really needed to do was turn on Mr. Brooks fast-fast-fast, put a finger right in his face and precede his remarks with "Look fucko..."  But then he would be faced with the unhappy task of explaining to his wife and all the little Dionnes why daddy didn't have no job no more, so don't waste to much time waiting at that bus stop...

End of 2013 Sunday Show tour.  Before exiting the vehicle, please check around your seat for any personal effects (or affects, hahaha) you may have dropped during the journey.

And looking back at that 2013 shitshow, the thing is, Republicans were entirely to blame. 100%.  There was no dispute about that.  What these two men were bitching about was that Obama had violated the legacy media's Both Sides Do It commandment by saying what everyone knew out loud.  That Republicans were at fault.  Period.  

And remember, this was a year and a half after respected political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published their now-famous article in the Washington Post, "Let's just say it: The Republican Party is the problem".  And the two diametrically opposed reactions to the article tell the story of just how corrupt the legacy media had become.  Because while it got both Mann and Ornstein blackballed from the Sunday Shows, it also quickly became the most widely read, shared and forwarded opinion piece they had ever written, even briefly crashing the Post's comment section servers.

Also, remember that the Mann and Ornstein column came a full decade after the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere, which gave us the capacity to say -- in print and in public -- all the stuff we'd been saying among ourselves for decades, but the legacy media wouldn't touch with a barge pole.  Especially our assault on the Both Sides Do It Lie.

But in October of 2013 that patently ridiculous lie was still being staunchly defended across the board by America's media elite on the Sunday Shows.

And in December of 2025 it still is.

*Note:  We mentioned this incident briefly on our December 23rd episode of The Professional Left Podcast.  However, we got the timeline backwards: Cruz's filibuster preceded the shutdown, it didn't follow it.  Management regrets the error and, rest assured, although our entire research staff and all of our archivists have all fled into the hills in shame, those responsible will be hunted down and brutally reprimanded.  

Burn The Lifeboats

 

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

This last Sunday morning I unexpectedly found myself with an hour or so to kill this, so I thought I'd take a peek at what's happening back at my old stomping grounds.  The Sunday Shows.  

As most of you know, I spent a fair fraction of the past 20 years on this blog deconstructing them every week, and watching as they only got worse.

So, this Sunday, I tuned in just in time to find the host of the mortal remain of Meet the Press, Kristin Welker staring into the camera, wide-eyed, as if she were well into Day Three of a staring contest with the moon.  

Enter Republican Senator James Langford and, after the ritual exchange of insincere pleasantries, Welker began zipping down a list of prepared question  hurriedly and cursorily. Like she desperately need to go to the bathroom, or perhaps like a postal worker, late for lunch, rushing through the "Is this the right address?" and "Are you mailing any nuclear material" questionnaire.  

It was all so fucking perfunctory.  She asked...something... and Senator James Langfraud lied about it.  

Example:  What's going on in L.A. is entirely California's own fault.  Trump is trying to de-escalate things you silly woman!

A quick "But what about...?" from Welker, in imitation of a genuine follow-up question, then another question, another series of lies.  

Example:  Something something everybody know tax increases always cause revenues to go down!  Yes, the 1,000th retread of that long debunked bullshit, told with all the confidence of a man who knows he's lying to a corporate shill who would never dare call him out on it.  

And then, oops!  That's all we have time for.

Exit James Langfraud, smirking.

Enter Democratic Senator Cory Booker, and Welker started down the same list of questions, zipping through in the same order.  And since it was Booker, mentally I began a slow count, waiting for him to arrive where I knew all along he was going to end up.  

Initially he did fine.  Called Trump a naughty bad man.  Mentioned that "...a lot of these peaceful protests are being generated because the president of the United States is sowing chaos and confusion by arresting people who are showing up for their immigration hearings, who are trying to abide by the law."

Cool, but I'm still counting. 

Touched on Abrego Garcia and the "over 250 people that Donald Trump has sent there, 50 of whom, who entered our country legally who did not get a day in court..."

Still counting.

And then, as predictable as the sunrise:

Booker: Let me just tell you, we're stuck in this right-left divide right now. 

And:

Booker: This is not about right or left, it's about right or wrong. 

And

Booker: There's a trust problem for Republicans and Democrats. 

And:

Booker: Most Americans voted against both of the presidential candidates in the last election.

And now I'm not listening anymore.

But wait!  Next up... OMG!  It's NBC's own stable of gossipy wine-moms! Olivia Munn, Leigh Ann Caldwell, Sara Fagen, Symone Sanders Townsend, Melanie Zanona! Swapping the hot goss about the big Trump/Musk breakup -- or is it a fake-up?

And then I quit watching and remembered why I've nearly stopped doing the Sunday Morning Comin' Down feature.  Because the Sunday Shows are just a mindless journalistic corpse, exhausted,  shambling along on nothing but inertia, long overdue for the grave.

But since you've come all this way, just for laughs, here's a Sunday Morning Comin' Down from the Before Time of September, 2008.  The names have changed.  Everything else has gotten orders of magnitude more awful, but the awfulness tracks along exactly the same trajectory that the GOP and the media were on in 2008... and 2004... and 1998... and 1988... and so on.  

We pick up the post about 1/3rd of the way in:

...Rove is a sociopath, Ghouliana is a carnage-pimp and Fiorina sees John McSame as her political 401K (at least until he sent her back to Failed CEO Coventry for going hilariously off-message.) The GOP is owned and operated by degenerates and monsters, and this whole drama had absolutely nothing to do with raising the standards of the debate.

Nothing.

The Republican strategy for the Fall was, is, and will continue to be to contaminate the public discourse with so many lies, bluster, faux outrage and irrelevant jetsam that the sheer avalanche of it will overwhelm the swing voters (on whom this election turns) and crush the media.

It is remarkably similar to a phenomenon dubbed “thrashing” in the Big Iron days of I.T; a state in which (according to my own, very loose and civilian-friendly definition) a CPU becomes overloaded with so many simultaneous and conflicting demands for system resources that the computer loses its ability to process information, priorities and instructions altogether and basically gives up and starts flailing around randomly.

When an ignorant or inattentive public perceives that the entire system is broken, they will punish everyone; the guilty and the (relatively) innocent alike: a cultural reflex that always redounds to the benefit of the most despicable. So, while survey after survey finds the public furious and frustrated by a do-nothing Congress, ask any ten outraged citizens and I guarantee you that eight of them have absolutely no idea that the reason Congress is deadlocked is that Republicans have spent the last two years using parliamentary napalm to carpet bomb every single fucking thing.

That the same party that screamed "Up Or Down Vote!" in the headlines every time Democrats even considered blocking a vote when they were in the Majority...has now broken all records for killing votes.

This is what happens when the majority of the citizens in a democracy have no fucking idea how their government works.

Which is why, far from being a sudden freak moment of honesty from Don Karleone, this Sunday was instead a careful experiment in finding the precise GOP mendacity price-point.

Finding the exact volume and intensity at which Rovian lies and smears will cause ignorant swing voters to "thrash" and shut down, but not so much that they will start to notice that both sides are NOT equally to blame, causing backlash against the GOP.

And while we are on the subject of Conservatives appearing to spontaneously regrow a shred of conscience, as regards David Brooks’ most recent “What’s that Poo Smell?” epiphany that his Party is a bloated corpse being towed like a reeking Easter Parade balloon through the empty rituals of politics by rich fascists to the cheers of poor imbeciles...so sorry, Bobo, but the last chopper took off from roof of the Goldwater GOP years ago, with Bill Buckley and John Dean clinging to the runners.

Just ahead of the hordes of bigots, barbarians and Christopaths who have run your Party ever since.

The Party for whom you have carried water your whole career and the President with whom you have so eagerly spooned these last seven, horrifying years did not come out of nowhere. The groundwork had been laid for them, quite openly, brick-by-brick, for the last 30 years, while people like you, Bobo, got paid a small fortune to mix the mortar.

And now, with the coming of the McSame/Palin ticker, you have the unmitigated nerve to come over all shocked and disappointed, when in reality they are really nothing more than the final, utterly predictable chapter of the Modern Conservatism you have stoutly defended year after year.

A ticket that perfectly highlights the two, remaining halves of the GOP: a doddering survivor of a bygone political age desperately pawing through his underwear drawer to find one last shred of honor to pawn to win an election on behalf of a Party that long ago evicted anyone with a conscience or a soul paired up with a glittering, ferocious, softcore little Falwell-in-bunny-boots who doesn’t know a fucking thing about the world except what she’s read on the deck of "Neocon Hegemony, Jebus and You" flash cards her handlers have been drilling her on for the last three weeks... 

I Am The Liberal Media

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

 

This efficiently explains both why I spent a big chunk of the last two decades deconstructing the Sunday Shows, and why I rarely bother anymore.  

My problem with the Sunday shows is this man will not be corrected by the host as he sits there and blatantly lies to the audience bc they don’t want to “look partisan.” https://t.co/pg2srBlPOL

— Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆 (@RachelBitecofer) June 1, 2025

The Sunday Shows are a lost cause, beamed in from a Bizarro World full of highly paid Muppets who laughed off the possibility that what has happened could ever happen -- 

-- and now let fascist scumbags run their mouths unhindered between ads for dick pills and reverse mortgages.  And in all that time, nothing that any of us who broke those shows down, week after week, and explained the terrible danger we were all in if their toxic folly was allowed to continue, has made the slightest difference.  

I Am The Liberal Media

...Even The Police Began To Sit Up And Take Notice.

 

Some professional journalism types are just now starting to play catch-up, bless their hearts.

To demonstrate this phenomenon, we first have to do some of that No Fair Remembering Stuff.

This is an excerpt from WHYY Boston's Philadelphia's* PBS station, from December of 2014.  And it is recounting events going back to 2001 and 2002:

But the thing is, Dick Cheney always Knows. 

 

His brand is blind certitude – “There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,” “We will in fact be greeted as liberators,” and the rest of his greatest hits – yet Meet the Press continues to indulge him. Which brings me to yesterday’s most groan-worthy moment.

At one point, host Chuck Todd asked Cheney whether he has any regrets about toppling Saddam Hussein. Cheney naturally said no, because Hussein “had previously had twice nuclear programs going. He produced and used weapons of mass destruction. And he had a ten-year relationship with Al Qaeda.” (Italics are mine.)

For more than a decade on Meet the Press, Cheney has been peddling variations of that lie – the lie that Hussein plotted 9/11 with Al Qaeda – in order to justify the ruinous invasion of Iraq. And he’s still doing it. And his hosts are still letting him get away with it.

Most notoriously, in December 2001 and in September 2002, Cheney said on the show that it was “pretty well confirmed” that 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had met in Prague with a Saddam secret agent “several months before the attack.” Actually, it had not been confirmed. As the bipartisan 9/11 Commission reported in 2004, the Atta-Hussein connection had been nothing more than a rumor.

The 9/11 Commission said that Al Qaeda and the Hussein regime had occasionally communicated over the years, but “we have seen no evidence that these contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen any evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with Al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States.”

Three years later, in 2007, a report by the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command reached the same conclusion. There was ” no ‘smoking gun’ between Saddam’s Iraq and Al Qaeda,” the defense analysts wrote, because Saddam and Al Qaeda didn’t trust each other. “To the fundamentalist leadership of Al Qaeda, Saddam represented the worst kind of  ‘apostate’ regime. A secular police state well practiced in suppressing internal challenges.”

If a “liberal” media outpost like Meet the Press persists in putting Cheney on the air, the least it should do is fact-check him by quoting the 9/11 Commission and the Pentagon report. Giving him free rein to lie yet again – in support of a long-discredited war rationale – is arguably far worse than giving him the mic to make the case for torture.

Put a pin in the these statements: "'liberal' media outpost like Meet the Press" and "the least it should do is fact-check him".  A big pin.

Early on it came to be known to anyone who was paying attention that the venerable Meet the Press was, in fact, Dick Cheney's favorite place to put his lies into the public record because they never pushed back.  

From The LA Times, February 12, 2007:

Those of us who get a kick out of watching Tim Russert every Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” are feeling a little hangdog these days. We always thought Big Russ Jr. was tough on the powerful. Now we learn that to some Washington media types on both the right and the left, he’s just a tool for the powerful.

What’s occasioned this perceptual turnabout is, of course, the perjury and obstruction trial of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, a former top aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, where Russert wrapped up two days of testimony last week. Libby says the NBC newsman fed him the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson, who is at the center of the trial. Russert says he didn’t.

To ordinary viewers, though, whatever transpired during Libby’s phone call to Russert back in 2003 couldn’t be as jarring as what the trial has unearthed about Washington’s deeply cynical attitude toward “Meet the Press,” a venerable, 60-year-old staple of network TV and the No. 1-rated Sunday news talk show.

A former Cheney press aide testified last month that she pushed to get the vice president on Russert’s show to bat down negative news because it was “our best format,” a program where political handlers can “control the message.”

We now rejoin the present-day, already in progress...

This is from Margaret Sullivan who, some of you may know, is the former media columnist for The Washington Post, and the fifth public editor of The New York Times and the first woman to hold the position. In that role, she reported directly to Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. as the "readers' representative".

From her newsletter yesterday.

As Donald Trump continued his chaotic and destructive march through a second term, the New York Times had a few choice words for what he’s doing, as they promoted an audio offering.

Ready?

“Trump’s New Charm Offensive.” I posted the full headline on social media, asking “Really, NYT?” and one respondent said she was so upset when she saw it earlier that day, she canceled her subscription over it.

That seems extreme since the Times has done a lot of very good reporting in recent weeks. But the headline does seem quite unhinged from reality, and it makes me wonder why no one stopped to question or change it. It represents the soft-focus presentation we see all too often that may well be an intentional business strategy on the part of the Times — everybody invited in to the big tent.

Here’s another over a David Sanger piece about how Trump’s policies supposedly would restore America’s manufacturing economy. (Sanger is excellent and deeply experienced, and the piece itself — mostly about Trump’s tariffs — is well reported.) The headline: “Trump’s Big Bet: Americans Will Tolerate Economic Downturn to Restore Manufacturing.”

As one Times reader aptly commented: “The headline here is misleading — none of Trump’s current policies will do anything to bring back manufacturing (quite the opposite) so treating Trump’s hypothesis as even remotely plausible is a massive disservice.” Here’s a gift version of the article; judge for yourself, and do scan the scathing comments.

Why does The Times too often normalize Trump like this, even now? Readers, your thoughts? Let me know. I have some theories, hinted at above and probably to be further developed in a separate post.

Ms. Sullivan was a journalist at the Post and the Times for decades, as well as the the public editor at the Times, which gave her daily one-on-one contact with the Times' publisher, so why in the name of Breslin and Royko is she asking her readers for their "thoughts" on the motives behind the Times' publishing this drivel?  

How the fuck would they know?  Also, Liberal bloggers have already spent more than 20 year theorizing why the Times and the rest of the legacy media are so addicted to Both Siderist bullshit, and are so prone to going soft and belly-up when confronted with belligerent Republican fuckery,

So instead coyly trying to crowdsource speculation about a question to which, as a former member of the Times' inner circle, you should damn well already know, why don't you tell us in plain, clear language why Sulzberger is doing this?  Or engage in that, y'know, journalism thing and do what none of the rest of us have the standing to pull off: call Sulzberger directly and ask him?

Meanwhile, over in the March 6, 2025 edition of The Contrarian, former CNN employee Josh Levs says "fact checks" are too little too late: "What we need in America is a truth countermovement." 

Why all those Trump fact checks are too little too late

Many Americans distrust the media, largely because false claims have gone unchallenged for so long.

In the latest episode of my podcast They Stand Corrected, which fact checks the news, I looked at the Sunday political talk shows. By the time I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I found more uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single episode. 

First, put another pin in this sentence: "By the time I pieced through the transcript for just one of those shows, I found more uncorrected misstatements of fact than I could cover in a single episode."  Another big pin.  We shall revisit it later.  

Second, wowzers!  

You mean the crown jewels of American political reportage were riddled with uncorrected lies?  

Tell me more!

For example, on a recent Meet the Press, Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said, “What Oklahomans want is to make sure that we get rid of the waste and fraud inside the federal government. And that's exactly what the president has done. They've already identified billions, billions of dollars of waste and fraud for the taxpayers.”

Host Kristen Welker mentioned that “they haven't provided proof of fraud.” But Mullin’s claim about all that alleged “waste” went uncorrected, even as he repeated it. “Within only four short weeks, we've already identified over fifty-five billion dollars of waste and fraud,” he insisted. That's not true. At the time of the interview, there was already proof that “DOGE,” the Department of Government Efficiency, had no clue what it was doing. Viewers wouldn’t know this.

Mullin was also asked about protests across the country and in his home state. “The chair of the DNC, Ken Martin, openly admitted on MSNBC just yesterday that they were manufacturing these protests,” he insisted. “They were bussing in armies to manufacture these protests.” None of this is true. But NBC’s Meet the Press let that claim go.

Meanwhile, CBS’ Face the Nation interviewed Trump's Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, who had met with Russian President Vladimir Putin at Trump’s request. “We've had, you know, close to a million-and-a-half deaths” in the Ukraine war, he claimed. No. Trump and his team have thrown around figures like that, but none of the figures available about Russia’s war on Ukraine shows casualty counts anywhere near that high. But no one watching that interview would know.

When I bring up this problem to news executives, they often respond with some version of, “Well, it's live. How are we supposed to fact check everything?” That's faulty thinking. Who says all this has to be live? What if news agencies—shocking idea—pre-recorded interviews and only aired them with fact checks?

And the solution?

What we need in America is a truth countermovement: a national demand for the media to cut through disinformation and deliver only the truth, always.

Until then, Americans will all too often be left freezing in a blizzard, drenched by a firehose, or under fire amid a blitzkrieg. And unscrupulous leaders will continue to wreak havoc through shameless lying.

I must now reveal a terrible truth about myself.  For the better part of two decades I ran a feature on my little blog out here in the middle of Middle America called "Sunday Morning Comin' Down" or "Sunday's Mouse Circus"  or "Voice of Empire".  I got bored every few years and changed the name.  

Anyway, every Sunday I wrote out a long deconstruction of most of the network Sunday Shows.  I started doing this back at Castle Driftglass in Chicago, before I had cable or any "Pause" or "Rewind" capacity.  This was before YouTube had video clips up for reference (Hell, practically before YouTube existed) and before transcripts were readily available.  

I watched as many as I could manage, live, on over-the-air broadcast teevee, remote in-hand, clicking back and forth between them all, or as many as I could stand, and transcribing as fast as I could, or at least extracting the gist and presenting it in my own, uh, style.

Here's a sample.  From me in January of 2006.  And, yes, that's 19 years ago...

Sunday Morning Comin’ Down

“Through an ass darkly…”

Wherein the GOP demonstrate their “Pre-1776” mindset.

Two quick-and-dirty highlights right up front that had me worried about my mental health.

Consider…

On Fox….in his ongoing fit of “Everybody Does It!”, Dirty-Jack was-a-bipartisan-pimp compulsive onanism, Chris Wallace frantically Abramoff’s himself all over his guest’s clean, Progressive suit, followed by an interview a coupla “Young Guns of the GOP”.

(Last week it was three Republican “reformers” that had squeegeed enough Dirty Jack Wank off their faces for us to see their lyin’ eyes and, forming a Papa, Mama and Baby Bear GOP Denial Kickline, managed to force their mouths to say the words “GOP Reformers” without that chemical cocktail that supersized The Joker’s pie-hole in “Batman”.

The contest, last week and this, is now how far and how fast can you distance yourself from Abramoff, and how many times can you repeat a variation of the phrase “bipartisan scandal”.

Abramoff? Never met the man.

Jack Abramoff? Never heard of him.

Lifelong-GOP-powerbroke-and-my-son’s-godfather, Jack Abramoff??? Why, he doesn’t even really exist. He’s just a Neocon Kaiser Soze we dreamed up; a myth to scare little Republicans.

As twas prophesied, they shall deny him three times before the cock crows. And Andy Sullivan wasn’t even on the Matthews’ Show this week.)

And then, on NBC – this week as last -- Chris Matthews doodles “George + Chris 4ever!!!” all over his Sunday Morning spiral-notebook, and openly pines and sighs for his Strong Man President to Rhett Butler him up the stairs, into the Lincoln Bedroom, for some rough, fascist sex that will finally make a real woman out of him...

FYI, the post goes on and on, covering most of the Sunday Shows.  For context, at this point George W. Bush's little over-by-Christmas Iraqi adventure was a full-on clusterfuck and now everyone could see it.  Which made all the usual Conservative pundits (who has spent the last few years giddily shitting all over us Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving Liberals on these very same shows) very uncomfortable.  

Here, preserved in the digital amber of my blog archives, was just such a moment on "This Week...".  From the same January, 2006 post.

[George] Will unpacks his wee soapbox, clambers atop it, and says, sure, we can bomb the crap out of Iran and knock it back ten years or so.

But, Will asks, “Then what?”

“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask bef…”

And in that perfect little jewel of a moment you could positively smell Karl Rove tickling the joystick that controls the high-voltage, barbed wire cock-ring that the GOP keeps wrapped around the withered sac of its pet journalists.

George unwrapped his lips from around the words he was just about to say like a man stung in the gums by a wasp the size of an Escalade. He then quickly shifted gears and began nattering on about Admiral Yamamoto telling the Japanese high command that, sure, he could attack the U.S. fleet and run wild in the Pacific for a “year and a day.”

…but “Then What?”

Of course the statement Will was verging on making before Karl the Klown jolted him back to goodthinkfulness was this:

“That’s the question. That’s the question we didn’t ask…before we invaded Iraq.”

But of course, that’s kind of a sore subject; one that the Stalinist Right has striven mightily to stomp down the ol’ Memory Hole and piss away into the mists of forgotten myth and lore.

Because, of course, people did ask that question before Dubya rolled our children into Iraq to be slaughtered behind his PNAC fantasies and petroleum dream, didn’t they George?

Millions and millions and millions of people asked that very question.

Very Loudly.

They were called Democrats, George.

And your Party called them unAmerican, remember George?

And even the Democrats who supported the invasion of Iraq –- and there were many of them -- made it very clear that they were not giving your President a blank check.

The Dem’s made it abundantly clear that there needed to be concrete, convincing evidence of an imminent threat. Evidence of WMDs delivered by inspectors on the ground. Evidence of some linkage to 9/11.

They demanded that enough troops be used to get the job done. And they insisted on a clear exit strategy.

And your President mumbled, “Yeah…Ok…whatever”, blew off every warning and caution, grabbed the keys to the car and drove it right off the fucking cliff, didn't he George?

And the Democrats who had made the epic mistake of trusting a dim little creep like George Bush to behave responsibly with the national Credit Card?

Your Party called them weak and cowardly, remember George?

Funny how you seem the effortlessly remember, oh, say, every stray stat surrounding Cal Koonce’s ERA, but can’t seem to remember these rather vitally important, life-and-death facts about your Party and President, isn’t is George?...

Once again, back in present day, someone needs to tell former CNN employee Josh Levs that my stuff is not unique.  A lot of other Liberal bloggers and podcasters were doing this too, and some still are.  We didn't just "[piece] through the transcript for just one of those shows" one time: collectively we deconstructed all of the shows, every Sunday, for decades.

And you know what, Josh?  It didn't make the slightest difference.  In fact, all of those shows just kept getting exponentially worse.  

So Josh, when you say "What we need in America is a truth countermovement." I don't know whether to laugh or cry or simply reply,  you mean like... Liberal bloggers and podcasters?

Because we're already out here, Josh, promiscuously violating the legacy media rules about not remembering inconvenient things every day,

And we've been doing it for decades.

*Thanks Alert Readers for the catch!

I Am The Liberal Media

Is Kristen Welker Very Good at Her Job...

...or very bad at her job?

On Sunday, Donald Trump's lies roll over her like the mighty Mississippi, and there was Welker, once again completely (to mix a metaphor) at sea, discovering again (but as if for the first time), that when you giving a lying sociopath a microphone, they're not going to observe all your quaint journalistic niceties. They're going to blow right on past them while you flop around like a fish on the dock.

Here, are a selection of Welker's impotent attempts to corral Trump into admitting that the J6 thugs and traitors he plans to pardon are, in fact thugs and traitors (h/t Crooks and Liars who have the video and entire exchange):

KRISTEN WELKER:  Well, you know —

KRISTEN WELKER:  But —

KRISTEN WELKER:  I just want to —

KRISTEN WELKER:  Yeah.

KRISTEN WELKER:  Let me just —

KRISTEN WELKER:  But let me —

KRISTEN WELKER:  Okay. Let’s move on —

NBC hired themselves another Chuck Todd.  Another David Gregory.  Which answers the question, whether or not Welker is good at her job.  The answer is, she's good at the job that NBC hired her to do: sit in that chair and perform an empty Beltway ritual which might, when glanced for a moment from a great distance through very dirty glasses, be mistaken for journalism.  

Finally, I see we're back to the legacy media trying to do make-goods on their televised failures by performing another empty Beltway ritual: ex post facto fact-checking.  

Fact-checking Trump's interview with 'Meet the Press'

The president-elect discussed the major policy priorities for his second term and made several false, misleading or exaggerated claims along the way.

Which is as useful as going home and yelling into a pillow after the bully has slapped you around and stolen your lunch money.  Again.

The Sunday Showz: As useless as a MoveOn petition.

Burn The Lifeboats

Same Planet, Different Worlds

This is, what?   The 4,000th?  The 5,000th exhibit offered in evidence that attempting to find intelligent life on the Right is a doomed project and a waste of time.

 Byron Donalds is piece of ornamental black Republican brik-a-brak who has traded what little conscience he had in the first place for a speaking role in a party of bigots and imbeciles.  And so, like a patched together May Day float, they roll him out whenever they need a black man to look straight into a camera ad straight-up lie.

One Sunday, the usually invertebrate George Stephanopoulos actually got up on his hind legs and pushed back on Donalds' lies.   It was kinda remarkable.

Above you see the two reactions.  

Aaron Rupar characterized Donalds' as being DEMOLISHED which as silly and wrong as every other ALL-CAPS conjugation of every other term for annihilate, crush or destroy in a political context.  These people don't get demolished, or  annihilated, crushed or destroyed because the only audience they're playing to are the reprogrammable meatbags on the Right.  

And you can see what reprogrammable meatbags saw when they watched exactly the same interaction as you and me and Mr. Rupar.   They saw an "unhinged", tantrum-throwing Stephanopoulos trying to bully a noble, 'umble, Republican man of God.  

But once again the Soros Fake News has failed!  Donalds' went into the very belly of the beast, and heroism prevails!

Like every other Republican killbot, Donalds will shrug it off and move on to the next rally, the next podcast, or the next mainstream media outlet foolish enough to put him in front of a camera.

It's a game, you see.

Democrats in the audience get pretend Donalds got DEMOLISHED.  That there is a larger meaning here.  That some imaginary "needle" will be moved.  But it wont.

Republicans get to feed the entire thing through the Fox News filter and, like magic, exactly what they wanted to hear comes pooping out the other side.

And ABC gets ratings. 

Meanwhile, over on CBS...

So, @edokeefe had all the smoke for Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre but could not fact check Tom Cotton. @cbs #DoBetter https://t.co/emb0cFnkIz

— B Towns (@IamBrendaTowns) August 4, 2024

What can I say, except...

I Am The Liberal Media

Sunday Morning Comin' Down: The Road To Dumb-Ass-Kiss (tm) Edition

 

Despite the staggering amount of evidence that's now piled up high enough to blot out the Sun, way too many people continue to use words like "embarrassing" and "humiliating" when describing the actions of Republican sociopaths.

But, of course, Republican sociopaths like lil' Marco, who appeared on Meet the Press today, aren't wired to feel normal human emotions.  He's wired to Gish Gallop false equivalences as fast as possible right over anyone asking any questions that might trigger embarrassment in a normal human.  

This is so embarrassing. Republican Marco Rubio WOULD NOT pledge to accept the election results in 2024 no matter who wins. Republicans don’t care about our democracy. They’re done with it. Trump has corrupted the entire party. pic.twitter.com/3C7MbbWEMR

— Harry Sisson (@harryjsisson) May 19, 2024

Kristen Welker refuses to accept Marco Rubio's lies about Hillary Clinton not conceding, NBC engaging in censorship, and his own vote to certify the 2020 election, "You voted to certify the election. Nothing has been censored on this program. Hillary Clinton did concede." pic.twitter.com/QcwQN9UZoB

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) May 19, 2024

"We're gonna have to do something dramatic" -- Marco Rubio on Meet the Press says he supports Trump's plan to round up migrants and send them to detention camps.

Kristen Welker then plays tape of Rubio saying in 2016 that he doesn't support Trump's plan to round up migrants. pic.twitter.com/g0XQNlngQL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 19, 2024

We're now fast approaching the 20th anniversary of a little joke I first told back when I was but a mere (long-winded) commenter at the late Steve Gilliard's News Blog.  You know the one:

Dick Cheney is found, naked, on the White House lawn tossing burning kittens at homeless veterans and hitting babies with a ball-peen hammer.

What are the first three words out of David Brooks’ mouth?

“But the Democrats!”

Decades ago, once they figured out that this was a nearly-foolproof hack of the mainstream media, every Republican politician became this joke in human form. 

This was Lil' Marco back 2016 (h/t  Crooks & Liars:)

Rubio Reflexively Blames 'Both Sides' For Violence At Trump Rallies

And this was my write-up of Lil' Marco's appearance on The Daily Show in 2012.  I believe he still holds the land-speed record for most Both Siderisms in the shortest time for this performance.

Centrism Triumphant

In case you missed Jon Stewart's award-verging "interview" with Marco Rubio, here is your rush transcript of Senator Rubio's answer to Jon Stewart every single time Mr. Stewart tried very respectfully to point out that Senator Rubio was, um, lying, and that the relentless, pathological obstructiveness of the Republican Party was unmatched by anything Democrats have done in modern history.

"Both sides..."

"Well, you know, both sides..."

"Both Democrats and Republicans..."

"That's just politics..."

"The Democrats left us no choice..."

"Both sides..."

"Democrats and Republicans..."

"Both sides..."

"Both Democrats and Republicans..."

And so forth, to the point of being comical.

Like every other Republican culture war criminal, Senator Rubio has been conditioned within an inch of his life to always answer any question about the unique perfidy and hypocrisy of his political Party with the Big Lie of Centrism and to refuse to stop repeating the Big Lie of Centrism until the questions stop regardless of circumstances....

Nothing has changed, except for the worse, which is why continuing to give these lying scum any platform anywhere is folly.  As I said, Republicans not wired to feel normal human emotions.  They respond only to a voracious hunger for power which normal humans will never understand, and the kind of abject terror which no teevee program host has the power to muster.   

Which is why, in their political heliotropism (look it up) they will always turn away from decency and democracy and towards Trump.  Because only Trump and his mob genuinely terrify them, and conversely, they believe that only Trump and his mob can grant them the kind of power that they crave above everything else.

So when filthy like Rubio or Lindsey Graham or J.D. Vance are invited on the Sunday Shows, don't imagine for a second that they're gonna get got. 

Q: Viktor Orbán seized control of universities and put them in foundations that were run by his allies. He rewrote the Constitution, he neutered the courts, and he has tried to control the media. Is that what you're advocating for in the US?

Trump VP contender Vance: I think… pic.twitter.com/1DOl2z69yL

— Biden-Harris HQ (@BidenHQ) May 19, 2024

The old Tim Russert The "Gotcha Question" schtick of playing some politician's old tapes from when they held a different position ack to them, then cocking an eyebrow and saying, "Well, senator...?" is as dead as Dillinger because the Republicans no longer feel any shame at what they are doing.  

There is no hope that some last tiny shred of conscience or dignity they have retained will, at the 11th hour, suddenly upwell in their chests.  Then, like Senator Paine in last reel of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, out will pour confessions of complicity and criminality and guilt.

Sorry, kids.  Never gonna happen.  Because their appearance on the Sunday Shows has nothing to do with you or me or the facts or the past.  Instead, those appearances are all about showing the meathead base that they're willing to march into the belly of the Liberal Media Beast and tell those lying Biden puppets to fuck off.  

And even more importantly, those appearances are all about making a public showing to Donald Trump that they have had a genuine Road To Dumb-Ass-Kiss conversion.  That they renounce everything they ever pretended to believe in and now wholeheartedly accept Donald Trump as their personal lord and savior, and will do literally anything to secure for him the seat of power which was stolen (or "stollen") from him by the Cheating Democrats and their Fake Media.

I Am The Liberal Media

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

 

I am currently working on an algorithm that will go through 18 years of my posts about Meet The Press and just swap in the name "Kristen Welker" for "Chuck Todd" and "David Gregory" and Iraq War-era "Tim Russert", and the post them as new.

Rep. Elise Stefanik: I have concerns about the January 6th hostages. We have concerns about oversight of our treatment of prisoners.

Kristen Welker on Meet The Press: (Silence)

This is journalistic malpractice. The insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol aren't hostages. pic.twitter.com/9bHOj94ZMr

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) January 7, 2024

It would save me all kinds of time and energy, and at this point it is so very clear that our political media does not give the tiniest shit about journalism and is completely immune to criticism -- and that Republican politicians know that and therefor feel free to lie with impunity -- that at this point all media criticism is doing is documenting the atrocities (as we used to say back in the day) for the benefit of some theoretical future historians who may be interested in how things in the United State in the here-and-now got so fuck up when everyone involved knew exactly what was broken and why, but those with the megaphones refused to speak that truth out loud.  

Today was also "Give a Lying Republican Sack of Shit Some Airtime" day at CNN as well, so...

Jake Tapper: "Do you think that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection?"

Mike Pence: "I never called what happened on January 6 an insurrection... it was a riot the way it broke out, and I've never seen it any other way." pic.twitter.com/lh80j3tPie

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) January 7, 2024

Meanwhile, over on PBS on Friday, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times was rooting for a 9-0 Supreme Court decision throwing out the Colorado 14th amendment case against Donald Trump.  

Mr. Brooks allowed as how he is "not a legal scholar" and therefore has no fucking idea about the merits of the case, but as a man with his finger firmly on the pulse of what the elite coastal .00003% of America who ride in the Acela Corridor quiet car with him whenever he has to commute to and from his wealthy suburban enclave, Mr. Brooks is certain of a few things:  

Brooks:  A lot of Americans have no faith in any of our systems. A lot of Americans have no faith in the other half of the country. And so we're in danger, in my view, of coming apart at the seams, of really entering a terrible era of violence even, political violence.

And so, in my view, if some lawyers took Donald Trump off the ballot, half the country would say, that's it. We're done here. This is a totally rotten system...

Yes, Brooks really is arguing that the traitors and morons of the Republican party -- who already overwhelmingly believe the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election -- are in danger of losing faith in American democracy if the constitution under which American democracy operates were actually enforced.  

And so, as has been true of Brooks' advice for the past 30 years, whenever the sane, Democratic majority is confronted with the deranged demands of a violent, racist Republican minority, the only sensible thing for Democrats to do is...capitulate to the mob and give 'em whatever they want.

Brooks:  So I'm hoping the Supreme Court will not uphold Colorado, but let the voters decide. In my view, we have to let the voters handle this one...

And so how does the Supreme Court handle this? If it becomes a partisan decision, then their part — then their — the legitimacy of the Supreme Court is even more in trouble.

Notice that for Brooks, the only acceptable and legitimate non-partisan solution to this issue would be a unanimous or near-unanimous decision in favor of Donald Trump and the deranged GOP.  Not for, y'know' "legal" or "constitutionally supportable" reasons, but because only by giving the Trump and his mob what they want -- only by appeasing the fascists -- does Brooks believe the court's plummeting legitimacy can be checked. 

Brooks:  So I'm hoping and expecting that John Roberts is going to work super hard to make this 9-0 or 7-2 or something like that, and maybe, if not restore some legitimacy, at least not have a legitimacy freefall, which I think is what we're looking at.

The Alert Reader will note that Brooks never bothers to mention why the court's legitimacy is at an all-time low.  Nowhere is Clarence Thomas' open, two-fisted corruption mentioned.  Or Thomas' wife's chin-deep involvement in Trump's attempted coup.  Or the theft of the Garland seat from Obama.  Or the packing of the count with perjurous Federalist Society hacks by Trump and McConnell.  Or the overturning of Roe.   Or, or, or...

Republicans have been gut-shooting the legitimacy of the Supreme Court and the lower courts for decades, but Brooks couldn't navigate himself to this obvious fact with a team of Siri, a sextant and a dozen Sherpa guides. Instead, hacks like Brooks treat all Republican atrocities like miserable weather: it can't be stopped, no one is to blame, and the best we can do is accommodate ourselves to it.  

But the real daisy here was Jonathan Capehart, from whom I expect very little during these PSB puppet shows, and who always delivers exactly what I expect.  

Having watched the combo of "Brooks and..." off and on for decades now, the PBS in-house rules are clearly "No disagreeable disagreements" and "No calling David Brooks either stupid or a liar or a stupid liar", all of which gives Brooks an enormous amount of room in which to operate.  

And Carpehart, who obviously wants to keep this very respectable PBS gig, never crosses those lines.  And thanks to a bit of awkward stage management, the moderator carefully steered Capehart around the necessity of directly addressing any of the ridiculous bunkum that Brooks had just laid out by instead reading aloud from a statement from a Trump PR flak::

Amna Nawaz:  Well, I want to read to you part of a statement we have just gotten from the Trump campaign and, Jonathan, get your reaction to what David just said and to this.

They say in a statement from Steven Cheung, Mr. Trump's spokesman: "We welcome a fair hearing at the Supreme Court." They argue this is a bad faith election interfering, voter suppressing argument to remove him from the ballot. I'm paraphrasing here.people had said...

And Capehart stuck to that and only that and let Brooks' garbage scow of rationalizations float right past uncommented upon.

Huh.  Well I guess nothing Brooks said could be that objectionable or Carehart would have, y'know, objected, right?

And yet, just hours later at his other gig -- his MSNBC gig -- Capehart and congressman Jamie Raskin had all kinds of spicy stuff to say about the clarity of the plain test of the constitution, the severe credibility problems under which the Supreme Court operated thanks entirely to Republican perfidy, the ridiculousness of the arguments that Trump's attorneys were advancing, and so on.  

And yet, just hours earlier, under the glare of the PBS lights, Capehart could not summon a single syllable of his obviously well-formed opinions to object to Mr. David Brooks' flotilla of bullshit.

And why?

Because it's all just a show.  

Because of the ground rules of the two different puppet shows he appeared on just hours apart.

And because ... money.  Always money.

Burn The Lifeboats